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Temporal Anti-Patterns

1 post · Oct 2024

What this trail covers

This thread tracks common anti-patterns and best practices for using Temporal effectively. It covers topics such as SDK wrapping, idempotency with Local Activities, leveraging Temporal's time-travel debugging features (Reset), managing Workflow History size, ensuring Workflow determinism, utilizing built-in Temporal features like Signals and Updates, and understanding Activity timeouts. This post adds guidance on avoiding 'mega workflows' by breaking down complex processes into smaller, manageable units, and emphasizes the importance of using Temporal's built-in features like Signals, Queries, and Updates, and the correct application of Local Activities and idempotency.

All Temporal trails
  1. Spooky Stories: Chilling Temporal anti-patterns (part 2)This post contributes to the 'Temporal Anti-Patterns' thread by detailing specific anti-patterns and their corresponding best practices. It advises against creating monolithic 'mega workflows' and instead advocates for breaking down complex processes into smaller, independent workflows, leveraging Temporal Nexus for inter-team coordination. It also stresses the importance of using Temporal's native state management capabilities over external state machines to avoid 'split-brain' scenarios. Furthermore, it reinforces the value of using default Activity retry policies for resilience and highlights the use of compensation patterns to ensure successful business outcomes even when individual steps fail.
  2. Spooky Stories: Chilling Temporal anti-patterns (part 1)This post contributes to the 'Temporal Anti-Patterns' thread by detailing specific anti-patterns related to SDK wrapping, the misuse of Local Activities leading to idempotency issues, the underutilization of Temporal's time-travel debugging (Reset) feature, managing Workflow History size, and the importance of Workflow determinism. It provides concrete examples and best practices for each, including recommendations on when to use regular Activities over Local Activities, the benefits of Temporal Reset for bug fixing, strategies for managing history size (e.g., Continue-As-New), and the necessity of testing for determinism and using Workflow Versioning/Patching for production code changes. It also highlights the importance of leveraging available Temporal features like Signals, Queries, and Updates.